Off to the Temple

This evening we will go to a Buddhist Temple and spend the night. The two groups who visited China and Japan on the program we are following also went to the temple, and their stories have become legend. We are hoping for warmish weather (it hasn't been too bad this week) because we will be sleeping in a place with no heat, so we are coming prepared with layers of clothes. We'll take a bus there and walk home; it's supposed to be a beautiful place in the mountains of Kameoka, not too far from our university, Kyoto Gakuen. We will be eating somewhat austere vegetarian food, sitting in lotus position, and listening to the chanting of sutras, following along with the meditative practices of the Buddhist monks. I am thinking of the experience as something comparable to staying at a medieval monastery, although I hope a little warmer. Here are some websites where you can see where we will stay, and listen to some chanting. I'm actually looking forward to going to sleep at 9 p.m., although we may be awakened at 4:50 a.m.!

http://www.naritasan.org/flash/okyou.swf
http://shofukuji.net/music/singyo2.mp3
http://www.tekishin.org/english/index.htm

River Tour

Yesterday several of us took a river tour from Kameoka. The top photo is of the autumn leaves turning red, which is a really big deal in Japan, drawing Japanese tourists and locals. The lower photo is actually from almost the end of the tour, when a snack boat came by selling grilled squid, tofu, eggs, and daikon. You can see Tim, who was smart enough to bring a hat. It was a little chilly on the river, but beautiful.




The river tour took us through the gorges that we catch glimpses of from the train. Three men powered the boat, one with a bamboo pole (used like a pole for punting on the Thames in England, meaning you push off from the bottom or by catching a cranny in a rock that protrudes from the water; one such high rock has been used for hundreds of years; this river used to be the way timber was transported downstream. Now the river transports tourists and kayakers. On the right side of the boat another man used an oar, tied with string to gunnells rather than an oarlock.

Tour of Kyoto

This is from October 31:

Today we had a tour with a tiny, energetic woman from the travel agency named Hiroko, which she told us was the most common female Japanese name. As both the Lonely Planet guide to Kyoto (the one most of us seem to have) and our guide noted, Kyoto has more than 1600 Buddhist temples and more than 400 Shinto shrines, so people who are interested in Japanese culture and history are usually happy as clams in Kyoto, where they can find more or what they are looking for than in any other Japanese city. Kyoto was spared the bombing rained on Tokyo, Osaka, and of course the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II, and there are many old structures to be found in Kyoto, although modern developers have succeeded where war fell short in destroying thousands of structures in the city in the past sixty years. It’s hard to warm up to much of the newer architecture, which to our eyes seems singularly undistinguished; there are more interested new buildings to be found in Beijing, where at least sometimes style wins over form. Our guide impressed on us the rules against building skyscrapers in Kyoto, but to my eyes they could use some prizes to reward interesting architecture that is not so purely utilitarian and just plain boring. We began with the Heian Temple, a Shinto shrine with two huge orange tori (ceremonial gates). She mentioned that although the idea of a shrine colored red was originally Chinese (think of the deep, pure red so often seen in Chinese restaurants, on lanterns, etc. – OPI Red, for those who are into nail polish colors) the Japanese preferred a lighter, brighter orange, a diluted red, if you will. Although the shrine is ancient, the gardens that surround it were not created until 1895, only a hundred years ago. It includes the first streetcar used in Kyoto, which was placed in the garden after streetcars were discontinued in Kyoto in 1925; the only connection between the two is that both began in 1895. Now the dusty green streetcar sits under a trellis, tucked into a corner of the shady garden, looking ready for the Boxcar Children to arrive. The Japanese take their gardens very seriously and much of our narrative today was about plants, especially trees, like the weeping willow, the official tree of Kyoto; the “drooping cherry,” tree peonies (Martha Stewart loves them), pine trees (one at another location is yearly cut into the flattened conical shape of Mt. Fuji, which costs an inordinate amount of money to pay the gardeners who do that), the lacquer tree (yes, it’s a tree!) and the trees with small shaky leaves that along with bamboo forests provide the characteristic feathery look seen in both old and new Japanese movies (I’ll write a little more in another post about the trees in Kurosawa Akira’s 1957 version of Macbeth called Throne of Blood, where Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, samurai style.) Then it was onto a Buddhist temple, one I had also visited this summer. It was a much more pleasant experience in the relative cool of October 31. Although it was foggy in the mountainous town of Kameoka when I left before eight this morning, by 9:30 the sun was out in downtown Kyoto on a sparkling Halloween day. It’s up a hill lined with small shops and restaurants. The temple itself is wooden and set into the side of a beautiful wooded hill.

Where's Pico?

http://www.powells.com/authors/iyer.html

Here's an interview with Pico Iyer, the author we've been reading; his parents are Indian, he was educated primarily in England, but his academic parents lived in Santa Barbara, California. He calls himself a 'mongrel' - not the most flattering term, but perhaps something that satisfies the British self-deprecating part of him.

Beiwai Shirts

The very day we were leaving Beijing on October 27 - the very hour, actually - we finally found the sweatshirts we had been craving with the name of our school there, Beijing Foreign Studies University (Chinese and Asian colleges don't sell college merchandise the way American ones do, and boy, are they missing the boat). I had asked the students to be in the lobby with their luggage, checked out of our dorm/hotel and ready to go by 10:30 a.m. This group, which is always prompt, was ready and in the lobby before 9:30 a.m. So we had time for a last run to the store in the next dormitory, and students found these shirts for sale - the sweatshirts for 40 kuai, which is about $5. We love these shirts, and wish we had bought more, or that they had more for sale. The Japanese are amused by us as Americans wearing shirts in Chinese, which they can read because one of the three forms of Japanese writing is kanji, based on Chinese characters. (The other two are hiragana and katakana.) This is Parker and Jeff and I standing in the International Programs building at Kyoto Gakuen University in Kameoka, about half an hour west of Kyoto on the JR Railroad.

Bears and Scarlet Knights

Although we cannot watch football here, we can catch a little CNN at the Self-Learning Laboratory, a very nice nice computer lab for language students with TVs that show CNN and also have continuous loops of Friends, and, for some reason, one of my guilty pleasures, the Kevin Costner movie The Bodyguard (hey - Kevin Costner taking a bullet to protect a woman! What's not to like? And he even likes Japanese film in the movie!) And we know the Bears are doing well. So is the football team at Rutgers, my alma mater, which is 9 and 0 and may even go to a bowl game! Navy, Gary's alma mater, is doing OK, I hear. He and I met after the Navy-Rutgers Game in 1969. Rutgers won.

Pico Iyer

We are reading travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer's Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, and a few students think they may have spotted him! If you are out there, Pico, we are reading you, and you have some fans here. We'd love to meet you.

'Stimulating and Sedative'

This phrase is used by Pico Iyer, in his travel memoir The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto, in describing Japan. Here is a photo of a beautiful rock garden in Kyoto, adjacent to the Nijo Palace, if I recall correctly from a day of touring shrines, temples, and palaces. The rocks were gifts brought to the site, arranged artfully to look more natural than nature.

Home Before Dark

Susan Cheever, in her wonderful biography of her father John Cheever entitled Home Before Dark, writes about a contest she and her father used to have thinking of potential book titles. One they both liked was 'Home Before Dark' and it became the title of her book. I have always loved the title, and the sentiment: although I don't mind working late during Daylight Savings Time, in the late fall and winter I crave flannel and homey food. It's fall here, and we are in the mountains when at Kameoka, and the leaves are turning, making it feel just a little like home. And I have a long walk from the train station (where I take the bus to and from the school) so I have to leave not long after four if I really want to be Home Before Dark.

It will take me a while to catch up with describing the transition from China to Japan, although I may just jump right into Japan without talking too much more about China. Japan is SO different! Here's just one example: readers of this blog will know how much I discuss food - and of course the food here is quite different (rarely spicy, different in texture, presentation, and cooking methods), which we knew. But our experience is made even more distinct because we are cooking for ourselves now and living relatively far away from one another, in apartments spread out along the JR train line near Kyoto, some in Nishioji, some near Kyoto Station, some in Hanazono. I am in a house in Kameoka owned by a professor and his wife who live next door. Last night, anxious to see some human beings after five p.m., I invited the students to dinner and cooked for them. I made spaghetti with Bolognese sauce (a Marcella Hazan More Northern Italian Cooking recipe I know by heart), chicken soup with Chinese noodles, salad with a vinagrette, and garlic bread. It was fun to cook for an enthusiastic group of eaters, including seven guys who are hard to fill up. I have just two burners, so there was a lot of dumping pasta into a collander and refilling it for a new round of spaghetti. Everyone helped out - Natalia chopped the vegetables, Aaron made slice after slice of garlic bread with butter and chopped garlic, Parker and Ashley washed dishes, Valeria (at KGU for the term on an exchange) brought mochi mochi - sweet rice balls with a sweet teriyaki sauce; Natalia brought delicious pastries from a French-style bakery near Kyoto Station, Aaron brought soft drinks, Erik brought little ice cream bars, and Jim and Jeff brought cookies. To serve 12 people on a budget I made the sauce from scratch and used the leftover onion, carrots, and celery left over from the Bolognese, along with some chicken necks (the only chicken I could find with bones at the grocery store) to make the chicken soup, made the vinagrette from olive oil supplied by my landlords and a small bottle of balsamic vinegar I splurged on, and garlic bread from large, thick slices of white bread (reminscent of Texas toast). The bread comes only five or six slices to a package, so we went through quite a lot. I was happy to find canned Italian tomatoes, celery (158 yen for ONE large stalk - not bunch, stalk), beautiful carrots, and onions. There was even a container of oregano and basil at the house which went into the chicken soup. I found the small, knotted Chinese noodles in the foodstore that Jackie likes and added them to the soup.


No English language television for us (we enjoyed CNN from Hong Kong and a huge array of cable stations in China, including HBO from Singapore and English-language programming on a number of other stations). Oddly enough, although I am watching an awful lot of Japanese infomercials, there was coverage of a DuPage County congressional race, the one between Pete Roskam and Tammy Duckworth. Although the program was in Japanese, it was fairly extensive, featuring charts of the Senate and House seats and even maps of blue and red states! It felt like a little touch of home to see an Illinois race and hear Illinois voices!